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Bosque de Fray Jorge National Park
Bosque de Fray Jorge national park (Spanish Parque Nacional Bosque de Fray Jorge) lies in the Limari Province, Coquimbo Region, Chile. It is a UNESCO Biosphere reserve.
Geography
The national park is approximately 100 km directly south of La Serena on the Pacific Ocean, as well as approximately 30 km to the west of Ovalle. It lies close to the Atacama Desert, in the Cordillera de Talinay, which is part of the Chilean Coastal Range. On the south, the park is bordered by the Limari River.
The park covers an area of 100 km, but the forests cover only 4% of its surface. The national park is known for having the northernmost Valdivian temperate rain forests. The coastal fog hangs on the mountain-slopes and moistens subtropical vegetation, allowing the hydrophilic forests to survive despite of being surrounded of semiarid scrublands, with rainfall no more than 113 mm annually. Actually, 113mm is the average rainfall. The forest is a vestigial survival of the last glacial period.
Typical plants of the national park include:
Peruvian pepper Schinus latifolius
Epiphyte
Azara celastrina
Lithraea venenosa
Porlieria chilensis
Olivillos (Aextoxicon punctatum)
Sarmienta scandens
Griselinia scandens
The park also includes a large number of smaller animals, as Degu, Chinchilla and foxes. Many different kinds of birds live in the park, such as the Chilean Tinamou (Nothoprocta perdicaria) and the Long-tailed Meadowlark (Sturnella loyca).
History
The Bosque de Fray Jorge national park was created in 1941 and is administered by the Chilean forest authority CONAF. UNESCO incorporated the national park as a biosphere reservation in 1977.
References
Translation from the Spanish and German Wikipedia sites (see interwiki links).
External links
Fray Jorge Biosphere Reserve
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Bosque de Fray Jorge National Park
